New Guinea is the most linguistically diverse region in the world. Besides the Austronesian languages, there arguably are some 800 languages divided into perhaps sixty small language families, with unclear relationships to each other or to any other languages, plus manylanguage isolates. The majority of the Papuan languages are spoken on the island of New Guinea, with a number spoken in theBismarck Archipelago,Bougainville Island and theSolomon Islands (for example,Lavukaleve. to the east, and inHalmahera,Timor and theAlor archipelago to the west. The westernmost language,Tambora inSumbawa, is extinct. One Papuan language,Meriam, is spoken within the national borders ofAustralia, in the easternTorres Strait.
Several languages ofFlores,Sumba, and other islands of eastern Indonesia are classified as Austronesian but have large numbers of non-Austronesian words in their basic vocabulary and non-Austronesian grammatical features. It has been suggested that these may have originally been non-Austronesian languages that have borrowed nearly all of their vocabulary from neighboring Austronesian languages, but no connection with the Papuan languages of Timor has been found. In general, theCentral–Eastern Malayo-Polynesian languages are marked by a significant historical Papuan influence, lexically, grammatically, and phonologically, and this is responsible for much of the diversity of the Austronesian language family.
The term 'Papuan languages' must not be taken in the same sense as 'Austronesian languages'. While all Austronesian languages are genetically related in one family, in the sense that they all descend from a common ancestral language called Proto-Austronesian spoken some 6,000 years ago... [Papuan languages] do not all trace their origins back to a single ancestral language... when a language is termed 'Papuan', this claims nothing more than that a language is not Austronesian.[3]
Most Papuan languages are spoken by hundreds to thousands of people; the most populous are found in theNew Guinea Highlands, where a few exceed a hundred thousand. These includeWestern Dani (180,000 in 1993) andEkari (100,000 reported 1985) in the western (Indonesian) highlands, andEnga (230,000 in 2000),Huli (150,000 reported 2011), andMelpa (130,000 reported 1991) in the eastern (PNG) highlands. To the west of New Guinea, the largest languages areMakasae inEast Timor (100,000 in 2010) andGalela inHalmahera (80,000 reported 1990). To the east,Terei (27,000 reported 2003) andNaasioi (20,000 reported 2007) are spoken on Bougainville.
Although there has been relatively little study of these languages compared with the Austronesian family, there have been three preliminary attempts at large-scale genealogical classification, byJoseph Greenberg,Stephen Wurm, andMalcolm Ross. The largest family posited for the Papuan region is theTrans–New Guineaphylum, consisting of the majority of Papuan languages and running mainly along the highlands of New Guinea. The various high-level families may represent distinct migrations into New Guinea, presumably from the west.[4] Since perhaps only a quarter of Papuan languages have been studied in detail, linguists' understanding of the relationships between them will continue to be revised.
Statistical analyses designed to pick up signals too faint to be detected by the comparative method, though of disputed validity, suggest five major Papuan stocks (roughlyTrans–New Guinea,West,North,East, andSouth Papuan languages);[5] long-range comparison has also suggested connections between selected languages, but again the methodology is not orthodox in historical linguistics.[6]
TheGreat Andamanese languages may be related to some western Papuan languages, but are not themselves covered by the term Papuan.[4]
The most widely used classification of Papuan languages is that ofStephen Wurm, listed below with the approximate number of languages in each family in parentheses. This was the scheme used byEthnologue prior to Ross's classification (below). It is based on very preliminary work, much of ittypological, and Wurm himself has stated that he does not expect it to hold up well to scrutiny. Other linguists, includingWilliam A. Foley, have suggested that many of Wurm's phyla are based onareal features and structural similarities, and accept only the lowest levels of his classification, most of which he inherited from prior taxonomies. Foley (1986) divides Papuan languages into over sixty small language families, plus a number of isolates. However, more recently Foley has accepted the broad outline if not the details of Wurm's classification, as he and Ross have substantiated a large portion of Wurm's Trans–New Guinea phylum.
According toRoss (see below), the main problem with Wurm's classification is that he did not takecontact-induced change into account. For example, several of the main branches of his Trans–New Guinea phylum have no vocabulary in common with other Trans–New Guinea languages, and were classified as Trans–New Guinea because they are similargrammatically. However, there are also manyAustronesian languages that are grammatically similar to Trans–New Guinea languages due to the influence of contact andbilingualism. Similarly, several groups that do have substantial basic vocabulary in common with Trans–New Guinea languages are excluded from the phylum because they do not resemble it grammatically.
Wurm believed the Papuan languages arrived in several waves of migration with some of the earlier languages (perhaps including theSepik–Ramu languages) being related to the Australian languages,[7][8] a later migration bringing the West Papuan, Torricelli and the East Papuan languages[7] and a third wave bringing the most recent pre-Austronesian migration, the Trans–New Guinea family.[7]
Papuan families proposed by Wurm (1975) (with approximate numbers of languages)
Malcolm Ross re-evaluated Wurm's proposal on purely lexical grounds. That is, he looked at shared vocabulary, and especially shared idiosyncrasies analogous to EnglishI andme vs. Germanich andmich. The poor state of documentation of Papuan languages restricts this approach largely topronouns. Nonetheless, Ross believes that he has been able to validate much of Wurm's classification, albeit with revisions to correct for Wurm's partially typological approach. (SeeTrans–New Guinea languages.)Ethnologue (2009) largely follows Ross.
It has been suggested that the families that appear when comparing pronouns may be due to pronoun borrowing rather than to genealogical relatedness. However, Ross argues that Papuan languages haveclosed-class pronoun systems, which are resistant to borrowing, and in any case that the massive number of languages with similar pronouns in a family like Trans–New Guinea preclude borrowing as an explanation. Also, he shows that the two cases of alleged pronoun borrowing in New Guinea are simple coincidence, explainable as regular developments from the protolanguages of the families in question: as earlier forms of the languages are reconstructed, their pronouns becomeless similar, not more. (Ross argues thatopen-class pronoun systems, where borrowings are common, are found in hierarchical cultures such as those ofSoutheast Asia andJapan, where pronouns indicate details of relationship and social status rather than simply being grammaticalpro-forms as they are in the more egalitarian New Guinea societies.)
Ross has proposed 23 Papuan language families and 9–13 isolates. However, because of his more stringent criteria, he was not able to find enough data to classify all Papuan languages, especially many isolates that have no close relatives to aid in their classification.
Ross also found that theLower Mamberamo languages (or at least the Warembori language—he had insufficient data on Pauwi) are Austronesian languages that have been heavily transformed by contact with Papuan languages, much as theTakia language has. TheReef Islands – Santa Cruz languages of Wurm'sEast Papuan phylum were a potential 24th family, but subsequent work has shown them to be highly divergent Austronesian languages as well.
Note that while this classification may be more reliable than past attempts, it is based on a single parameter,pronouns, and therefore must remain tentative. Although pronouns are conservative elements in a language, they are short and utilise a reduced set of the language'sphonemic inventory. Both phenomena greatly increase the possibility of chance resemblances, especially when they are not confirmed bylexical similarities.[citation needed]
Purari (has been linked to Eleman, but with little evidence)
There is a cluster of languages in West Papua between the upperTaritatu River and the PNG border, including Molof, Usku, and Tofamna listed above but alsoNamla,Murkim,Lepki, andKembra, which do not appear to be related to each other or to other languages in the area. Namla, recently discovered, may prove to be related to Tofamna once more data comes in. Murkim and Lepki show some similarities to each other, though these may not be genetic.
Søren Wichmann (2013) accepts the following 109 groups as coherent Papuan families, based on computational analyses performed by theAutomated Similarity Judgment Program (ASJP) combined withHarald Hammarström's (2012) classification.[10] Some of the groups could turn out to be related to each other, but Wichmann (2013) lists them as separate groups pending further research.
9 families have been broken up into separate groups in Wichmann's (2013) classification, which are:
An automated computational analysis (ASJP 4) by Müller, Velupillai, Wichmann et al. (2013)[13] found lexical similarities among the following language groups. Note that some of these automatically generated groupings are due to chance resemblances.[citation needed]
Selected Papuan family groupings in theASJP World Language Trees of Lexical Similarity (version 4)
Bill Palmer et al. (2018) propose 43 independent families and 37 language isolates in the Papuasphere, comprising a total of 862 languages.[14] A total of 80 independent groups are recognized. WhilePawley &Hammarström's internal classification of Trans-New Guinea largely resembles a composite of Usher's and Ross' classifications, Palmer et al. do not address the more tentative families that Usher proposes, such asNorthwest New Guinea.
Language families of New Guinea, the North Moluccas, and the Lesser Sunda Islands according to Timothy Usher. Languages of Bougainville, the Solomon Islands, the Torres Strait Islands, and Northern Australia were not included in the study, and they are portrayed here according to current consensus.
The following families are identified by Timothy Usher and Edgar Suter in their NewGuineaWorld project:[20]
In addition, poorly attestedKarami remains unclassified. ExtinctTambora and theEast Papuan languages have not been addressed, except to identifyYele as an Austronesian language.
Joseph Greenberg proposed that theAndamanese languages (or at least theGreat Andamanese languages) off the coast ofBurma are related to the Papuan or West Papuan languages.Stephen Wurm stated that the lexical similarities between Great Andamanese and the West Papuan and Timor–Alor families "are quite striking and amount to virtual formal identity [...] in a number of instances". However, he considered this not evidence of a connection between (Great) Andamanese and Trans–New Guinea, but of asubstratum from an earlier migration to New Guinea from the west.
Greenberg also suggested a connection to theTasmanian languages. However, the Tasmanian peoples were isolated for perhaps 10,000 years, their disappearance wiped out their languages before much was recorded of them, and few linguists expect that they will ever be linked to another language family.[citation needed]
William A. Foley (1986) noted lexical similarities betweenR. M. W. Dixon's 1980 reconstruction of proto-Australian and thelanguages of the East New Guinea Highlands.[21] He believed that it was naïve to expect to find a single Papuan or Australian language family when New Guinea and Australia had been asingle landmass for most of their human history, having been separated by theTorres Strait only 8000 years ago, and that a deep reconstruction would likely include languages from both. However, Dixon later abandoned his proto-Australian proposal,[22] and Foley's ideas need to be re-evaluated in light of recent research. Wurm also suggested theSepik–Ramu languages have similarities with the Australian languages, but believed this may be due to a substratum effect,[8] but nevertheless believed that the Australian languages represent a linguistic group that existed in New Guinea before the arrival of the Papuan languages (which he believed arrived in at least two different groups).[7]
^Wichmann, Søren (2013)."A classification of Papuan languages"(PDF). In Hammarström, Harald; van den Heuvel, Wilco (eds.).History, contact and classification of Papuan languages. Language and Linguistics in Melanesia. Vol. Special Issue 2012. Port Moresby: Linguistic Society of Papua New Guinea. pp. 313–386. Archived fromthe original(PDF) on 2020-11-25. Retrieved2018-07-17.
^Müller, André, Viveka Velupillai, Søren Wichmann, Cecil H. Brown, Eric W. Holman, Sebastian Sauppe, Pamela Brown, Harald Hammarström, Oleg Belyaev, Johann-Mattis List, Dik Bakker, Dmitri Egorov, Matthias Urban, Robert Mailhammer, Matthew S. Dryer, Evgenia Korovina, David Beck, Helen Geyer, Pattie Epps, Anthony Grant, and Pilar Valenzuela. 2013.ASJP World Language Trees of Lexical Similarity: Version 4 (October 2013).
^Palmer, Bill (2018). "Language families of the New Guinea Area". In Palmer, Bill (ed.).The Languages and Linguistics of the New Guinea Area: A Comprehensive Guide. The World of Linguistics. Vol. 4. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton. pp. 1–20.ISBN978-3-11-028642-7.
^Foley, William A. (2005). "Linguistic prehistory in the Sepik-Ramu basin". InAndrew Pawley; Robert Attenborough; Robin Hide; Jack Golson (eds.).Papuan pasts: cultural, linguistic and biological histories of Papuan-speaking peoples. Canberra: Pacific Linguistics. pp. 109–144.ISBN0-85883-562-2.OCLC67292782.
^Holton, Gary; Klamer, Marian (2018). "The Papuan languages of East Nusantara and the Bird's Head". In Palmer, Bill (ed.).The Languages and Linguistics of the New Guinea Area: A Comprehensive Guide. The World of Linguistics. Vol. 4. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton. pp. 569–640.ISBN978-3-11-028642-7.
^Stebbins, Tonya; Evans, Bethwyn; Terrill, Angela (2018). "The Papuan languages of Island Melanesia". In Palmer, Bill (ed.).The Languages and Linguistics of the New Guinea Area: A Comprehensive Guide. The World of Linguistics. Vol. 4. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton. pp. 775–894.ISBN978-3-11-028642-7.
^Pawley, Andrew; Hammarström, Harald (2018). "The Trans New Guinea family". In Palmer, Bill (ed.).The Languages and Linguistics of the New Guinea Area: A Comprehensive Guide. The World of Linguistics. Vol. 4. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton. pp. 21–196.ISBN978-3-11-028642-7.
^Dixon, R. M. W. (2002).Australian Languages: Their Nature and Development. Cambridge University Press.ISBN0-521-47378-0.
^abFoley, William A. (2018). "The morphosyntactic typology of Papuan languages". In Palmer, Bill (ed.).The Languages and Linguistics of the New Guinea Area: A Comprehensive Guide. The World of Linguistics. Vol. 4. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton. pp. 895–938.ISBN978-3-11-028642-7.
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